Stephen Thompson

Okay.

This season treats being a member of Generation X like being a member of the greatest generation and not the generation that literally like personified the term slacker.

Essentially, the conceit of the season is like Survivor, slightly older people versus slightly younger people.

Yeah.

But they talk a lot about these generational divides that are just incredibly standard to any generational split where the older people are like the young people don't know what they're talking about with their Pokemon cards and their participation trophies.

But then the actual gameplay is excellent.

And like with Cook Island's.

The concept is weak.

The cast is terrific.

Even a lot of kind of survivor archetypes that are typically filled by not terribly nice people here are filled by nice people.

And so you have a bunch of people who are playing a hard game.

strategic kind of sophisticated game they're assessing all the game theory stuff and the alliances are shifting constantly but it's easy to follow it's good natured you don't have the kind of viciousness that i think undercuts the enjoyment of a lot of the earlier seasons it is one of my favorite kind of new era new school seasons of survivor

So my number two pick is season 31.

It is Survivor Cambodia Second Chance.

It is an all-star season, as the title suggests, but it is, I think, one of the best ways to do an all-star season, which is to specifically bring back players who have not won and who have not played three, four, five times the way some of these all-star seasons kind of keep bringing the same players back over and over and over again.

I think often with all-star players, all-star players are typically kind of their most interesting, their most hungry, and their most sophisticated as players in their second go-round.

And I think this season really demonstrates that.

I think also the structure of how they brought people back really proved beneficial in terms of who wound up on this cast.

They picked 32 former players who had never won the game.

threw it open to a fan poll.